Kids walking to school not the danger it seems
If this is the first school year that you’ve let your child walk to school alone, you may need to prepare yourself for one of the cruel realities of the world we live in today.
No, it’s not a creep who uses candy or puppies to lure kids into his van, or even a lead-foot driver speeding through the school zone that you’ve got to worry about most.
It’s the busybody in your midst with the Children’s Aid Society on speed dial.
Despite public awareness campaigns that show it’s much more dangerous for our kids to be inactive, staying inside or being driven everywhere, busybodies are still ratting parents out for letting kids walk to school, take transit or play alone at the park.
Take the case of a Vancouver dad who, over a period of two years, carefully trained his four eldest children — ages 7 through 11 — to take public transit to school, only to find himself investigated recently by social workers after B.C.’s Children’s Ministry received a tip about his kids’ transit commute.
His children are now forbidden from riding transit to school or even from walking when they’re staying at their mother’s house, which is closer to the school. This is bonkers. Sadly, we continue to perpetuate the myth that the world is a more dangerous place than it was when we were growing up. In fact, the opposite it true. Statistics Canada data show that, in 2013, policereported crime was the lowest it had been since 1969 after steadily rising until the early ’90s, then declining for two decades.
Yet we’ve established a norm of driving our kids places to which they could easily walk in the company of siblings and neighbours, and of keeping them inside in front of iPads instead of letting them roam the block or go to the playground.
All the evidence shows that it’s our hovering, overprotective ways — and those busybody neighbours — that are putting our kids in grave danger.
Let’s take a look at the case of the Vancouver dad, Adrian Cook, who was admonished for letting his kids ride transit to school.
As The Canadian Press reported in a story about this debacle, Statistics Canada data show that there were zero deaths of children 14 and under on buses in Canada between 2009 and 2013, but that during that same time, 106 children died inside private vehicles.
Now let’s tackle the thing that’s truly a parent’s worst nightmare: having your child snatched off the street by a kidnapper. Yes, any incidence of this happening is too many, but in commonly held perception, the risk of kidnapping is likely inflated at least 100 fold. The vast majority of missing children are runaways and almost all the Amber Alerts you read about are cases where someone known to the child has taken them, usually related to a custody dispute or other domestic situation. An RCMP report shows that the odds of stranger abduction in Canada are somewhere around 1 in 5.8 million.
Compare that to some other risks that we seem to overlook: the odds of a child drowning are one in 220,000 in any given year, while the risk of getting killed in a car accident is one in 24,000.
As for whether our kids are safer from accidents walking on the side- walk or strapped in the back seat of the vehicle, you need only look to a federal report on Canadian motor vehicle collision statistics for 2014. It shows that 15.7 per cent of fatalities are pedestrians, while 18.9 per cent are passengers and 50.9 are drivers.
Then there’s the seemingly less acute but even more common problem of kids being fatter and less active than any generation before.
While we’ve been worrying about them going missing on the way to the playground or to school, we’ve been keeping them inside and underfoot — and when, naturally, they drive us bananas, we let them be entertained by screens.
Incredibly, the legal age for leaving children unsupervised in Ontario is actually 16 (only two other provinc- es, Manitoba and New Brunswick, have an age restriction and it’s 12 in both places). Now, in practice, this is way out of step with how people live and how they’ve managed their families for generations. As just one small illustration, the Canadian Red Cross offers babysitting courses to kids ages 11 to 15. I was certainly babysitting neighbourhood kids by 11 or 12, just as the benefit of having a child reach their preteen years is a little help supervising siblings on the way to school.
Instead of fretting about the worstcase scenario that plays out in crime dramas, we should be far more concerned about the very real risk of kids getting heart disease by age 30 because they’ve been overweight since childhood.
Wrestling with our fears is no easy task, especially in a hyperconnected world with news feeds that tells us when a kid gets abducted on the other side of the world, magnifying the risk of stranger danger in our minds. Even without that, becoming a parent is a little like agreeing to wear your heart on the outside, so desperate are we for our children to be safe and happy in this world.
Just this morning I watched with a little trepidation as, along with a friend, my 10-year-old rode his bike to school for the first time, my control of the situation disappearing as he rounded the corner out of my sight.
But part of our kids’ road to a safe and happy life is learning to make their way in the world, little by little, under our lessening supervision.
That’s why we’ve got to be prepared to agitate for change so that misguided strangers who tattle on parents don’t find validation in draconian laws that fly in the face of where true risk lies.
We must not let either busybodies or outdated policies dictate our choices and hamper our ability to do the very important work of training our kids to be adults. Brandie Weikle is a parenting expert and the host of The New Family Podcast and editor of thenewfamily.com.